He used to say, "The worst of it is I do believe." Had he seen God as I see him, I am sure his heart would have relented.' She went on to say, that his sins, great as they were, admitted of much palliation and excuse; that he was the child of singular and ill-matched parents; that he had an organisation originally fine, but one capable equally of great good or great evil; that in his childhood he had only the worst and most fatal influences; that he grew up into manhood with no guide; that there was everything in the classical course of the schools to develop an unhealthy growth of passion, and no moral influence of any kind to restrain it; that the manners of his day were corrupt; that what were now considered vices in society were then spoken of as matters of course among young noblemen; that drinking, gaming, and licentiousness everywhere abounded and that, up to a certain time, he was no worse than multitudes of other young men of his day,--only that the vices of his day were worse for him.

The excesses of passion, the disregard of physical laws in eating, drinking, and living, wrought effects on him that they did not on less sensitively organised frames, and prepared him for the evil hour when he fell into the sin which shaded his whole life.

All the rest was a struggle with its consequences,--sinning more and more to conceal the sin of the past.

But she believed he never outlived remorse; that he always suffered; and that this showed that God had not utterly forsaken him.

Remorse, she said, always showed moral sensibility, and, while that remained, there was always hope.
She now began to speak of her grounds for thinking it might be her duty fully to publish this story before she left the world.
First she said that, through the whole course of her life, she had felt the eternal value of truth, and seen how dreadful a thing was falsehood, and how fearful it was to be an accomplice in it, even by silence.